Rudy Fichtenbaum wrote: > I was also taken a back by Mulligan's claim that the stimulus was just too > expensive. He claimed that it was about $250,000 per job. ... Maybe I am > thinking about this the > wrong way but it seems to me that the cost per job is the $387.5 billion > (which is assumed to be a permanent increase in spending) divided by the > 3.674 million jobs which is about $105,470 per job. Am I thinking about this > correctly?
it looks like your calculation is right (though I'd have to look into it further). My point is that it's a mistake to talk about the "cost of creating jobs" in this way (as Mulligan does); instead of simply looking at the government budget when judging programs, we should think of it from society's (hypothetical) point of view. If workers are truly unemployed (as most of them are), that means that the _opportunity cost_ of getting them jobs is effectively zero: nothing is lost by putting them to work (and by putting unemployed capital goods to work), while there are clear benefits. -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
